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by BoxWineConfessions



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, Passage of time, Platonic to Romantic, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, jailbait wait, shiro is really not okay with this
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-04
Updated: 2016-11-03
Packaged: 2018-08-28 23:11:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8466601
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BoxWineConfessions/pseuds/BoxWineConfessions
Summary: Based on the kink meme prompt: Shiro and Pidge are soulmates. They discover this while they're still at Keith's shack. Shiro is a little weirded out, thinking that he has a 12 y.o. boy for his soulmate. Upon finding out Pidge is actually Katie and in her mid teens he feels slightly better but still a bit weird about it. 
“Did you lose your soulmark when this happened?” She asked. “My soulmark changed during all of this,” she says dryly as if she’s trading syntax files with Hunk. “It used to be in kanji.” She rolls up her sleeves. “It changed. Now, it’s quite obviously in Galran.”





	

**Author's Note:**

> I thought I was forever done with this pairing, but the kinkmeme pulled me back in. Undermined will be finished later in the month. Tin Pan Alley Cats is on hiatus until Christmas holiday when I can sit back for a few days and think about nothing more than catboys.

Pidge is fourteen when he sees the mark.

Shiro notices the thick purple numerals on his forarm the night between his rescue and their finding the blue lion. He’s passed out on the couch next to the “big man,” Hunk…Despite his size he takes up 2/3rds of the couch without shame. He forces Hunk into a small wedge in the corner. His long green and white shirt is raked up over his abdomen and his arm is flung across his eyes. His mouth is wide open, and he, much like the numbers written in alien scrawl that he shouldn’t be able to read are laid bare. The letters, “117-9875” burn into the back of his retinas like hot coals. It’s the first real shred of anything that he can properly call a memory.

In all honesty, it scares him almost as much as the metal arm, or the fact that the last coherent thing he can remember is standing on the surface of Kerberos with the Holts.

The little one…Pidge….Scratches his soulmark in his sleep without stirring. It causes him to look down at his right arm for a moment, at the place where his own soulmark used to be. Usually they are a name, or handwriting…His was written in code, a series of zeroes and ones that he’d never cared to have analyzed. Growing up his mother had offered to take him to a fortune teller to get them analyzed. Now they were gone, but burned into his memory unlike anything else from his hazy past.

A fortune teller’s interpretation is unneeded now. He’s seen this little slip of a boy push Keith out of the way of a computer and start mashing out code as if it were as easy as breathing.

Keith tells him it’s good to have him back.

He tells his old friend that it’s good to be back. It doesn’t feel like a lie. The lie, that night is that he doesn’t feel some kind of comfort from being able to finally make sense of the numbers that used to be on his arm.

Pidge is still 14 when it all starts to make sense.

Shiro’s never really considered men before. To be fair, he’s never really considered women much either. Between trying to graduate flight school with good marks, and maintain whatever status he’d gained in the Garrison, there had never been time to consider exactly _who_ was at the other end of those lines of code.

Still…He doesn’t expect a boy who is ten years younger than him. He should expect it really…As his memory slowly returns he remembers quite clearly the family crisis that struck when his older brother Ryu met his soul mate. It was his literature teacher at Waseda University. Hayato was divorced with three children, the oldest of whom was just a few years younger than Ryu. Hayato was eighteen years older than Ryu. Perhaps his bad luck and Ryu’s bad luck were supposed to balance each other out. 

Why couldn’t it be simple? His parents met in Hakata by chance when his mom was studying as an international student, and his father was trying to work two part time jobs and make passing marks in his classes. If dropping a tray of drinks on your soul mate’s lap, if finding them by _chance_ was good enough for his parents then it was good enough for him.

As many ways as he tries to twist and turn it in his mind he still would’ve never anticipated a child genius who had clearly skipped several years of flight school to get where they are today. Would’ve never anticipated that his soul mate was the daughter and sister of the two people he’d failed the most.

Life was cruel like that. Soul marks were equally cruel in that way. He thought of Keith’s arm. How it was blank, and how it had been since he met the other man. He thought of how Keith often scratched at it as if some kind of message was begging to emerge from his skin, but something or someone kept it hidden.

He decides to keep it hidden from Pidge. It’s not difficult to do, because his own soul mark was torn from him. Pidge is young, and vibrant, and despite the awful circumstances she’s been placed in she’s thriving.  He wants to hold her secret, help her find her family, and help her grow. Knowing will only hold her back. She doesn’t need a broken person like him, regardless of what her soulmark might say.

Pidge is fifteen when she starts to catch on.

She’s doing maintenance on his arm shortly after the castle had been negatively affected by the Galra crystals. Something, whether it was Sendak, or his broken mind, or some mechanism within the arm caused it to malfunction. It remained clenched into a tight fist no matter how hard he tried to loosen his grip.

Without fear she turned on a hyper-powered magnet, attached his arm to the table, and began work. “Did you lose your soulmark when this happened?” She asked as she made a small incision into the metal with a torch cutter with a flame barely the size of a pinhead.

He didn’t respond.

“My soulmark changed during all of this,” she says dryly as if she’s trading syntax files with Hunk. “It used to be in kanji.” She rolls up her sleeves. “It changed. Now, it’s quite obviously in Galran.”

Pidge is fifteen when the lies begin.

After the incisions are made and the thin patches of metal skin are peeled back from his arm, she detaches a single wire. Instantaneously his hand goes limp, and the glow is gone. She quickly goes about rerouting power and reattaching wires.

“When I was younger I wanted to be a doctor,” she remarks offhandedly as she works. “Guess this kinda counts right? In a back alley surgery kind of way.” She lets out a dark chuckle.

“Thanks for taking this seriously,” he responds with a half smile.

“No, Shiro, I’m serious. It’s every little girl’s dream to slice open their-“ her breath hitches. Before he wouldn’t have heard it. After a year of having to pick up on every sensory detail he can glean from his environment, it’s almost deafening. “Teammate’s arm with absolutely no formal training,” she finishes.

“Give yourself more credit,” he stammers between clenched teeth. He can feel the sweat beading at his temples. “Barely stings,” which is partially true. The pain is not so much physical as it is emotional. What’s keeping the magnet which kept his arm restrained from failing? There’s a panic attack welling up in his chest, and it takes every ounce of energy and control he has to remind himself that he’s not under the druid’s cruel touch.  There’s no one safer to be with.

When she’s finally finished, Pidge turns off the magnet and releases his arm.

He rubs his metallic palm with his other hand. “Good as new.” The tension is completely gone, and Pidge’s repair has barely left a “scar”. The weld mark where Pidge had made the incision was on a seam, and the weld mark was barely visible after she buffed over the seam.

“Can you read it?” She asks while he’s struggling to pull his shirt back on. When he pulls the shirt over his eyes, she’s got her arm thrust into his space.

He takes her hand within his and runs his thumbs across her damp palm. He’s snuck furtive glances at the numbers before, but this is the first time he’s been able to look at them freely. He’d tried to forget the messy scratched numerals etched into his cell door. After talking to the prisoner, he couldn’t forget no mater how hard he tried, his prisoner ID burned blindingly bright on large screens in the arena.

Hers is the crudely etched version. It’s infuriating, that she has to wear something so hideous for the rest of her life.

“They’re numbers.”

“I know that.” The infinite patience that was in her voice seconds before is gone. She yanks her hand away from his. Annoyance is left behind. “I ran it through a translator as soon as I got access to one with Galra language. What do they mean?”

“I don’t know.”

Pidge is six weeks away from her fourteenth birthday when the pain begins. She doesn’t say anything to mom about it at first. It’s rare that she doesn’t wake up with her head pounding from crying the night before. The aches and pains in her muscles become commonplace when she starts getting tossed out of offices on her ass, or roughly escorted by force off Garrison property daily.

By the time she enlists she’s done enough research to have an idea of what is going on. There’s not a word for it in English. The Gemans call it liebetoten, and it happens when your soulmate suffers on such an intense physical level it can be felt by the person’s mate. It’s a rare condition, but sometimes it’s so bad it kills the unaffected mate. The Germans have a word for everything.

Whoever he or she is has suffered endlessly.

Pidge wishes she were the kind of person who would be more affected by her soulmate’s pain than her own. She wishes that the thought of them, out there dealing with this alone would make her cry more than the strange red welts blemish her skin.  Even though it’s _only_ been six months and she’s _just_ fourteen, she’s been hardened immensely by the Kerberos accident. When all is said and done, whoever they are, their disposition keeps her bedridden in between simulators and coursework. They’re keeping her from reaching her goals.

Three months after she enlists and six months after Kerberos was reported lost, she wakes the entire dorm block up with her screaming. Her arm feels like it’s been ripped away at the elbow. Yet, it is still there and still in-tact. Her whole body is cold and clammy. The pain is unimaginable, and she passes out in Hunk’s arms.

Pidge didn’t remember taking her advanced computer science midterm the next day. Hunk said that she went against doctor’s orders and charged out of the infirmary higher than a kite on multiple kinds of pain killers.

She does remember two things. She got a perfect score, and by the time the pain meds wore off her soulmark had changed. Gone were the neat jet black lines that formed the characters that said, “Takashi.”

Pidge is fifteen when she confirms what she already knew in the bottom of her gut for some time now. If television, movies, and human anatomy text books were anything to be believed, puberty was a bitch but being around Shiro was agonizing. By the time she met him, she’d seen more naked men than she ever cared to see in a lifetime.

Not to mention, she was “one of the guys.” She had plenty of deep meaningful relationships with men.

Most importantly, there were thousands of men named “Takashi,” never mind the Galra part that made it all just a bit more than coincidental.

Being around Shiro _felt_ like something or someone threw a switch. It started with the sweating, but of course it didn’t stop there. She couldn’t help but make up any excuse to find him on the castle ship and see what he was up to.

The movies always make it seem like you’re supposed to be a blushing stuttering mess when you’re in that awkward liminal stage of meeting your soulmate but being unable to see the mark. That’s how she knows she’s onto something. Life is never like in film.

Being with Shiro means feeling safe. She hasn’t felt that way in over a year.

Not to mention, ever since she met him, the pain is gone. Except for when he uses the arm in battle. Her own hand feels puffy and swollen for a few hours afterward like she’s been stung by a bee.

After Haggar scattered them across the universe, and she finds herself in the garbage colony, she stumbles across a series of magnetic holo cassettes. One of which contains his fights. She watches it while curled up in the Green Lion’s cockpit. She can’t really fly right now, but she can still play files.

It’s horrifying, watching him move, and dodge, and deliver blows.

She knows by now the sequence of her new soulmark, so when she sees it flashed on screen after Shiro’s victory as the camera zooms in on him specifically she recognizes it immediately. The numbers on her arm are his prison ID.

Shiro is twenty-five when he first feels Pidge’s pain.

They haven’t been paladins for very long, but she has considered her own death before. She imagined Sendak doing her in when he attacked the castle. Being fatally shot by a nameless Galra sentry seemed more likely than this.

Unlike Keith, Lance, and Hunk, Pidge has had a bit more time to think about her own untimely and glory less death. Between feeling Shiro’s arm getting ripped off, and the countless other horrors she’s vicariously endured, she’s more or less become accustomed to the kind of pain that makes flashes of white blind your eyes until you pass out.

Used to it to the extent that a person can. The anxiety of pain has faded over time. Now she just deals with the raw feeling, doesn’t get emotional about it.

Pidge cautiously lifts her hand away from the stab wound on her chest. In the reduced gravity, droplets of blood slip away from the gash and into the air around her. It splatters on the visor of her helmet and onto the base of the green lion’s paw.

This was unexpected. She always assumed Keith would be the first to get stabbed, given his penchant for knife fights and all.

Of all the low lives the universe seemed to have to offer, she didn’t expect to get stabbed by extremely jumpy scrap metal hunters. At least they left quickly, and deemed the lion too large to take with them. She couldn’t have defended it otherwise.

Shiro is twenty-five when he first feels Pidge’s pain.

“Shiro,” his name is torn out of Keith’s throat, and it snaps him back to reality. “I need you _here_ ,” he barks.

The sound of Keith’s voice violently pulls Shiro back to the present. The sharp and inexplicable pain in his chest is the very least of his worries.

Except, he can’t force it from his mind. Other than a small gash on his shoulder, he remains unharmed for the time being. He can only assume that the Galra sentries that tracked them down here were sent with very explicit instructions to not kill them. Or at the very least, not to kill him. He knows much like when the black lion tells him something, or he feels some detail from the past without properly remembering, that whatever the exact cause of the pain is, Pidge is the source.

He’s dealt with far worse pain before, but this is especially brutal. He’s hard, and he’s weathered, and he’s damned to survive no matter how much he endures.

He knows what the sting of a blade feels like. It’s moment of altered reality where you can see the blade pierce skin and muscle and organs, feel the blood dripping out against your skin, but can’t actually feel it.

Then, when the paper thin protection of shock wears off, the suffering begins.

He knows what he feels, and he knows that he hasn’t actually been stabbed.

She shouldn’t have to endure it. Ever. Selfishly, he wishes he were there to comfort her. He lacks her aptitude. He couldn’t stitch her up with the same precision and expertise that she handles his arm, but he wishes he could do something. Stop the bleeding, or let her squeeze his hand when the pain was too much to bear, find something or someone to help.

It makes the current task of trying to survive difficult, but he soldiers on trying his best to deflect the larger Galra from Keith.

“Be strong Pidge.” He murmurs under his breath. The pain awakens something primal within him, and he kills Galra until his hand hurts from use.

“Quiznak I’m trying.” She growls through gritted teeth without really knowing why, other than the words seem to roll off of her tongue automatically.

She forces herself to calm down for a moment as she threads the needle through her skin and pulls what she hopes are medical grade stitches through her skin in an attempt to close the wound. At the very least, there are lots and lots of antibiotics in the medical kit as well. Here’s hoping they had an expiration date of longer than ten thousand years.

“Look,” she collapses against the foot of the Green Lion. The sutures are finished, sloppy, and will surely leave a scar. From her position, head hanging off the foot, she can stare upward at the lion’s lower jaw and the dozens of pieces of garbage that litter the space between her and the lion’s helm. “Please let me make it out of this one.” Her breathing comes out in short uneven gasps, and she can feel the cold sweat pooling across her skin beneath the armor.

Even though the spot on her chest aches, she can’t stop thinking about the night she woke up with crippling arm pain. She can’t believe she felt so cold towards him when she didn’t even know him. “Please help me get out of this.” Green already knows everything about Dad and Matt, she’s told her as much during long nights spent down in the hangar when there’s little else to do than talk to your semi-sentient metal lion. Did she know about Shiro too? “I want him to know that I know.”

Shiro remembers fighting them at every turn the first time around. His recapture thrusts forward in vivid detail every futile attempt at trying to break free when the cell doors were opened, when he was dragged back to the druids after a fight for medical treatment. He’s not compliant now, but his attempts at escape are much more targeted. Highly refined, but rarely effective.

Each morning, as the three moons of whatever planet he’s on fill his small cell with light he traces over the small red scar on his chest. It should be invisible among all the others that are much wider and far deeper, but he knows that whatever happened, Pidge had in fact been strong. He allows himself a sliver of comfort. Keith got away with the lions, and probably hates him for it. Pidge is out there somewhere, alive.

When he was younger, he spent a considerable amount of time tracing the numbers on his am and wondering who they were, and what they were like. What was their favorite subject in school? Did they like currant ice cream? Because his mother kept buying it, and he hated it. He can remember saving up pocket change and buying a calculator at the 100 yen store, because it was very clear that whoever they were liked numbers. Needless to say he doesn’t have the calculator anymore. 

He fails to see himself be that enthusiastic about the implications of his now missing soul mark ever again. Somewhere, in the midst of those long days and never ending nights, he decides that at the very least he can talk to her if he makes it out of here.

Pidge is thirteen the first time she defies a Garrison officers for the first time as a civilian.

Pidge is fourteen the first time she gets tossed in the brig as a cadet. She’d really, really tried to keep a low profile, but she got caught sneaking off base three weeks into the start of spring semester.

Pidge is fifteen when she does something that would’ve gotten her tossed in the brig for months, if not years if she were still in the Garrison. Pidge doesn’t get angry often, doesn’t lose control, but before she can comprehend what’s going on she’s slapped the black paladin across his face.

As soon as the sting in her hand registers she screams out, “Sorry!” but it’s too late. She’s already wrecked whatever kind of tentative peace they had between them.

Keith runs his hand across his reddening cheek with a furrowed brow and clenched jaw. He looks confused, like he knows damn well that Pidge just smacked him, but he has no idea what an appropriate reaction would be.

“I probably deserved that,” he says after a slight pause.

She’d expected screaming or returned blows. His calm demeanor is chilling. It makes her want to grab the lapels of his jacket, haul him down to her level, and demand to know what happened after the wormhole.

She restrains herself for no reason other than she knows that’s what Shiro would want.

“I just need you to trust me Pidge. I don’t need you to like me.”

Shiro is twenty-six before he pilots the black lion again.

It’s been four agonizing months after his rescue, and she still hasn’t said anything. Never mind the fact that she thought about exactly what she wanted to say to him everyday that he was gone. It was always something short and terse and along the lines of, “Don’t overthink it.” She still thinks about it now that he’s here and alive, and she’s out of excuses other than, “he hasn’t said anything either.”

She doesn’t blame him though. There’s no good time to talk about it. If they were on Earth their situation would already be laden with problems. Age gap soul mates got the side eye for years, sometimes decades until the younger partner turned some magical and undefined age. Then, as if it were never a problem at all, the gossip and judgement would stop.

Unless of course their gap was too large. That too was some magic and undefined number, of which she had no idea what was acceptable. Mom and dad were thirteen years apart, but people stopped staring right around the time she noticed gray hairs at mom’s temple.

Never mind the fact that people still talked after that. It was common knowledge and easy gossip that her parents weren’t soulmates. Just widows playing pretend.

Here in this strange thing they called reality, they might die any day. She can’t help but crave closeness: a hand on her shoulder, or an extra word of encouragement that she’d grown accustomed to getting before the wormhole.

Her friend. She wants her friend. He used to come down to the hangar and hand her tools and hold the flashlight, dutifully for hours. He used to put a blanket over her on the frequent occasion she passed out in the castle’s common room. If it’s the bond that pushes him away, it makes her hate the bond between them once more.

 She can’t pretend to understand what he’s going through.

There are no hard and fast rules on how to handle an age gap, but there are cultural mores that dictate that Shiro stay away. Norms that suggest that anything he says or does to her could cause her undue influence. Combine that with the million and one other awful things he’s had to deal with in the past year and a half…

If she stops and thinks about it too hard she’ll have to confront the fact that even after all of this, she still might be _just_ a teenager. There are certain things that are beyond her realm of experience or understanding. Talking about it isn’t going to fix anything, or make anything easier between them.

Pidge pauses in between sit-ups, her breath is ragged. Everything she touches is covered in sweat, and she can feel the low burn in her thighs as she clenches her muscles against the sit-up bench and holds her head to her knees.

She tries to ignore the fact that she’s getting stared down.

It’s a well-known fact that she’s never been the last person in the training room. Ever. There’s no reason for her to believe tonight would be any different.

Keith had made the executive decision that she needed to work on her strength training until she could lift something heavier than her bayard.

She listened because she and Keith have a strange and unspoken understanding between them now. She follows the dumbest of his plans without question. It doesn’t matter if it means doing extra training or making maneuvers that would make a normal pilot pass out. He got Shiro back to them. She’ll follow him now completely.

However, Shiro’s a different man now. The infinite patience they’d grown to love wasn’t quite so infinite. The immaculate façade of a leader was cracked, and something wholly imperfect and human was left in it’s wake. It wasn’t that Shiro was somehow a worse tactician or somehow motivated them less. Quite the opposite. Shiro relied on all of them much more to make decisions in battle, especially Keith.

It somehow worked. Made them stronger when they all saw this fallible human side of him.

 “What are you staring at Shiro?” She asks without turning to look at him. She can tell he’s off to the left of her peripheral vision, most likely coming from the room with the specialized cardio machines. Instead, she pushes herself to keep going, because if she stops she’s going to collapse in a big Pidge shaped puddle on the floor.

“You have so many red marks,” Shiro says in a voice that is soft, almost a whisper. She can hear the hint of something else in his voice. It’s not unlike the sound of regret that creeps in when he accidentally takes side in one of Lance and Keith’s arguments, like he can’t believe he said the words out loud.

Unlike the boys she can’t just rip off her shirt and rock the sports bra whenever she wants. She thought she was alone, which is why she didn’t care if the swaths of skin that aren’t quite scarred, but don’t quite look natural are exposed. It’s like she spent too long out in the sun and only put sunscreen on small portions of her body.  

Time stands still for a moment as she holds her body in a strained position mid crunch. She’s might’ve practiced what she wanted to say when the mice came to pay her a visit. None of the recited words come to mind now.  

“I’m sorry,” he says in a tone that makes her shudder. There’s a hint of tenderness there, but when he talks like this it’s like he’s a different person. He becomes so broken and defeated, and she’d never wanted to be the cause of it. “That I caused you so much pain.”

“Don’t be.” Without a single shred of grace, she climbs down from the sit up bench. Her foot stays hooked in the cuff and she sort of slides and falls off simultaneously.

Shiro makes an undignified yelping noise at her descent onto the mats that line the floor and moves to help her.

Unfazed, she reaches for her water bottle and takes a long draught. “Seriously, don’t be Shiro. I used to hate you.” She can feel her face twist into a grimace as soon as the words spill out. That’s not how she wanted to explain what she’d been going through for the past year or so.

Most of the marks are relatively light in comparisons to the ones that line Shiro’s body. She’s had enough opportunities now between fixing his arm and training exercises that often ended with the guys shirtless, to see how her sunburn like marks match his deep scars perfectly. “I didn’t know you back when it started.” She looks to her right arm. Right above her right elbow is the only place its extremely visible. The scar tissue that wraps around her arm in a band fades in and out between purple, red, and numb white. “I hated you because it hurt so much. Now? I can’t believe that was ever the case.” At this point she’s had multiple chances to be very, very wrong about Shiro.

 From the hug he gave her when she told him her secret to the cups of nunvil he used to bring her during late coding sessions to now, when he just sort of looks at her. Lost and far away. It makes her stomach churn to think that she eve thought poorly of him.

He shuffles across the mats and sits next to her, their crossed legs close but not quite touching. “Would you like to know what my soul mark said?”

“I’d love to.” Her mouth goes dry because even though she knows and he knows, and they know that each other know, she’s morbidly curious.

“Where’s your laptop? I need to type it out.”

She leans forward, and roots around in her bag for a moment. Plush toys that Lance has won for her at various galactic arcades spill out alongside her growing universal candy collection. Sheepishly she pushes the items back inside after retrieving the device.

With a single metallic digit, he slowly types, “01110000 01101001 01100100 01100111 01100101”

“How do you remember all of that?

“It was important,” Shiro supplies as if that were enough of an explanation. As if his mind hadn’t jettisoned one thousand and one more important details for the sake of explanation.

“You know what it means?” She says as she stares at the numbers on the screen. The dull green gray glow makes her lenses glow opaque and blinding white.

“No. I never went to a fortune teller to have it explained. I wanted to find you on my own.”

“It says Pidge,” she says after swallowing a particularly large lump in her throat. There was nothing sad or regretful in his tone. Just Shiro being Shiro. Naturally, thoughtful with a tinge of wistfulness. “In binary.” She adds as an afterthought. “It must have been big…for a soul mark.”

“Not really,” He takes her wrist into his metallic arm and rotates it so he can look at her mark. “12 point serif font. Neat and tidy. Not like yours.” And as soon as his hands were on her, they were gone.

 “Pidge,” his voice takes on another, different tone. It’s the same demanding yet kind voice he uses as their leader, but softer and more restrained like when he’s vulnerable and he’s accepted that he is.

She turns to finally meet his gaze. His tone is urgent,  but the tuft of white hair that rests on his forehead is messed up, splayed flat against his damp forehead and it makes her want to laugh at the ridiculousness of it all. She bites her tongue.

“It can’t compare to feeling my arm get torn off but, did you get stabbed while we were all separated?”

Pidge can feel her mouth go dry. She’s been protective of Shiro when she’s known him. Loathed him when she felt his pain.  Now that she’s the cause of his discomfort, she doesn’t know what to feel.

Pidge pulls her tunic to the side and Shiro instinctively shields his eyes. “Pidge!” he says in a scandalized tone that a man of his size and accomplishment should never have.

“Settle down Shiro, I’m not flashing you. Just look.” She reveals the scars left behind from sloppy, do it yourself stitches.

“Oh,” without looking away from her scar, Shiro pulls his shirt to the side and reveals a twin one just below his collar bone by the armpit.

“Stitched it up myself,” she takes a moment to feel the uneven and diagonal ridges of the suture marks on his skin. The gesture is kind of…what’s the word…indulgent? Possibly indulgent.

‘You know,” Shiro pulls back and shoots her the patented smile that could melt ice planets with its warmth and genuine friendliness. It’s rarer these days, so she makes sure to revel in it for as long as she can. “I’m not going to stop you from becoming the great person I know you can be.”

“I know that.” She answers too quickly. “I like that. I want that.”

“Good.”  

 


End file.
